Page 39 - Effective Communication Skills Mastery Bible 4 Books in 1 Boxset by Tuhovsky, Ian

context and situation, when it’s possible to do so, I simply

ignore it like someone would ignore a tiny, silent fruit fly on

the other side of the room. Anything people say to you doesn’t

have any meaning except for the meaning you give it.

I’ve read three different books about people who survived
Nazi concentration camps and Soviet gulags during World War

II. Despite the fact they were treated inhumanly, cruelly and

their torturers attempted to smother their will to live at every

moment possible, what all of these people had in common is

they did not respond as these things were happening to them.
They responded in a completely different way, reflecting their

belief of who they really were. At the end of one of these

books, there was a touching and eye-opening quotation from

an extermination camp survivor’s secret diary, later found by

American soldiers. It was a twenty years young Polish girl
who wrote,

“It’s my eighty-sixth day at the camp. I lost probably
about 20 kilograms, I can see my every single bone and
there are bruises on every centimeter of my body, but I’m

still alive, which makes me really grateful. I also shared
my bowl of grass soup with a starving little Jewish child,
and the Nazis didn’t notice. Today I was looking at Nazi

soldiers. Poor people, they are watching us from behind
these metal bars. If I’m behind the bars, so they are. We
can’t leave this place, and so they can’t until their vain
mission is accomplished. Locked in this prison of foolish
human pride and self-conceit, and they think we are the

only ones trapped in here.”

All of these people (Polish girl, Russian soldier and Dutch-

Jewish professor) in all three books did exactly the same thing

to make their wall against the hell. They disconnected what

happened to them with how they interpreted this situation.